


every sunday (getting more bleak)

by queenscourt (cafeanna)



Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Confrontations, F/M, I Just Write Here, Implied Incest, One-Sided Attraction, Open Ending, Pining, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 18:31:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11167620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cafeanna/pseuds/queenscourt
Summary: Clary gives out a cry like she’s about to attack, but the violence is merely verbal.“Oh, fuck you. Fuck you! That’s just like you to start a fight with me and then go running off when you don’t like my answer.” His heel spins in the dirt, but when he looks back she’s crying. She’s crying and he is disarmed, cigarette forgotten between his lips.AU in which Clary and Jonathan were raised together and Clary finds out something very disturbing about her brother.





	every sunday (getting more bleak)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really just trying to get into the habit of writing again. And I know my grammar is shit. Sad thing is, this is my first language. Ha. Regardless, I have a monster Clary/Jonathan one-sided fic on my laptop that I would like to polish off an publish, so a test run if you will. a piece of my story. Something stream of thought that I tried to make work. 
> 
> AU in which Clary and Jonathan were raised together and help Valentine in his search for the Mortal Cup. However, Valentine spills secrets and Clary doesn't know how to handle this new information.

Jonathan sucks on the end of a cigarette while he waits for Clary outside the shipping docks. It’s already dark outside, the muggy weather blotching out the stars, but he is content to wait and corner his sister when she arrived.

This has become their new game, Jonathan crying wolf and waiting for frantic Clary to arrive, but this time actually warranted some alarm. Valentine had summoned her and, like all things, Jonathan would deliver.

So, he waits. 

If she just left the apartment like a normal, he may have been able to follow her, but Clary is smart about these things and her rune powers are only ever growing. She Portals wherever she wants to go, and tracking her down has become too much of a hassle with everything else in the New York Institute. Texting is just easier.

He knows she is still in New York, nevertheless. After ransacking their mother’s apartment, they found a pair of rings—one silver, one gold—each with a lock of their fine baby hair twisted around the jewel centerpiece. Its old magic, untraceable and difficult, but reliable; and, he knows, that Clary carries his ring on her necklace. 

Her gold ring hums against his skin, nearer and nearer. 

It’s enough, for now.

He casts a glance at as a car rolls by, impossibly slow, but blind to him. He flips them off anyway.

Jonathan has made it no secret that he wants to do the ritual, to become his sister’s parabatai, but Valentine disapproves, so they withhold. If they were to cross him in this especially, then Jonathan is going to get a great deal more than a demon-whip to his back. He might actually hurt Clary too, and that is something Jonathan would never tolerate. 

So, like always, he buries his pride and want and greed beneath a heavy lid like Pandora, and moves on. 

He and Clary are bound forever in other ways—the last of the Morgenstern clan. If anything else they are an exotic breed of Shadowhunter and, a perfect set, boy and girl. 

His cigarette burns down to the filter and he reaches into his pocket to grab another, when footsteps reach his ears; boot heels. Clarissa is walking towards him, coming out of the shadows of the westbound street at an easy trot; the burnt scent of magic clings to her, against the curve of her neck and hair. Her rune magic has never exactly smells right. 

When she sees him, her mouth forms a grim line that makes his stomach drop both in annoyance and some shameful fear. What has he done this time? 

She taps her wrist, where a watch would sit if she wore one. “Six minutes.”

Ah, the cigarette.

His mouth quirks and he tosses the filter into a nearby puddle. “I made it last ten.”

“Sick,” she mumbles and her gaze flickers past him, to the ship. Her cheeks are pink from the cold; he wonders how long she had been out and about. “I got your text, what’s going on?”

Jonathan leans back against the iron fencing that ringed half the shipyard from the surrounding factories, arms crossing his chest. He feels like making an ass of himself, and Clary lately has been more and more obliging. When he can get her to talk to him, of course. However, this particular exchange has been going well so far, so he relents. He’s nice like that. 

“Valentine was looking for you. I told him you were on a hunt in Chinatown looking for wolves of interest.” She exhales through her nose, apprehension clear on her face.

“What did he say?” 

“Nothing much,” he drawls truthfully. “I think he just wanted you instead. He had to deal with me for four hours alone.”

Clary says nothing against this; however, it wasn’t exactly a secret that her talks with Valentine usually ended in less blood and bandages. 

She reaches for him, unconsciously; to take his hand, touch his elbow or cheek, but stops halfway, and reins herself back, tucking her hands away into the folds of her jacket. Her eyes downcast as if she caught herself doing something she shouldn’t.

He doesn’t vocalize it, but he feels the stab of rejection as clear as the day his secret came out. 

She hasn’t touched him or spoken to him at any great length, since her last talk with Valentine. It’s maddening.

Even more so, he knew. He knew that once Clary found out, that there would be a period of time where she would not speak to him, perhaps a few days or, worst case, a month. But he had contented himself with the knowledge that Clary cared for him and, despite his wanton demon heart, she would come around, or something of that nature. 

Now, he is faced with his horrifying underestimation of her disgust and his endurance. 

It’s been a week and he is already starving for her like a man in a desert. 

Once, they would talk all the time, on various subjects and concerns; they used to share themselves with each other. Now she won’t even look him in the eye. And he is furious with Valentine, himself, but above all her.

The one person he swore to protect and love is disgusted by him and she could care less if he rots.

“Thank you.” Jonathan says nothing as Clary shifts her weight awkwardly back. It’s unbecoming on her, like a child shifting under the scrutiny of an adult. “Do you think he’ll want to talk to me now, or should I head back—?” 

“Actually, I think I’m going to head back to the apartment.”

“Okay. I’ll check in with Valentine then. Tell him about my findings in Chinatown.” She throws him a smile, that same disarming grin of mischief and fire that he used to love; now it haunts him, a mockery of their forsaken familiarity. “But I’ll be back a little later—” He can’t take it anymore. 

“So are you going to just keep avoiding me?” He cannot count the times he has rehearsed the words in his head, but these are not the words he wanted just then, but they feel right.

Clary looks at him as if she has been smacked. 

He can’t help it; the words tear out of him quicker than be can swallow them up again; and they’re angry, building upon his starvation and rejection for days, weeks, years. After Valentine revealed his secret, he cannot cover up the ugly as he did before, now it comes spilling out, in awful human ways. 

“What?” Clary takes a step back, unconscious and measured, and she stares at him, caught off-guard. “What?” 

He tastes the snarl in his voice and doesn’t curve it. “Don’t look at me like that; you’ve been using every excuse just to get away from me. Don’t even try to lie. I can smell it on you. If you’re going to turn your back on me too, at least do it properly.” His teeth sink into his tongue, damning himself for the words—the thoughts—the damned feelings—but he can’t stop himself. 

And Clary just stares at him, unmoving and silent.

He feels something burning deep in his chest, like sickness; something deep and cancerous taking root in his body and nesting there with all his hateful, greedy desires. It’s colonizing. 

Embarrassment, as ugly and dreaded as her pause, rises in his throat and he looks away, balling up his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Where the fuck are his cigarettes? 

“You know what? Never mind. See you later.” He dodges the looks she throws at him, daggers turning to grains of sand as he walks away, pace quick, head down, cigarette and light operating in his hands. Nicotine bliss in just a few—

“Jonathan!” Her hand snags his shoulder and he lulls into a half-turn, hands still cupping around his mouth. Clary’s eyes digging into him, every facet of emerald grading against his weakest points. He pockets the lighter. “Jonathan . . . what do you want me to do? I can’t fix this.” Her voice is soft and sobby. 

I can’t fix you. The words hang in the air between them and Jonathan feels something very human and very fragile begin to crack inside of him.

The anger is welling up in him again, just as fast. “Tell me the truth. You don’t tell me where you go and you turn your phone off when you leave. What’s wrong with you? You never used to be like this.”  
That seems to strike a chord with her because all of a sudden, she shifts into defense and her hand jerks away from his shoulder as if he burned her. He can still feel the ghost of her hand, her fingers pulling against his collarbone. 

“Are you seriously arguing with me about going out today? Jonathan,” she pauses, shock ringing high and clear in her voice. “You—you do realize I’m talking about you here, right?”

Jonathan clenches his teeth and sucks in his lower lip, biting down those words and all he wants to say. Her rejection, he’s sure, he can handle. But abandonment? He’s not sure he can stomach for another day. He hasn’t been apart from Clary for more than a day since she was born, current record notwithstanding. He’s not used to being alone without her.

“Jonathan,” She says reining him back from his reverie. “Nothing is going to be the same again.” She whispers, but there is an edge to her voice; an indication that the coming change is his fault. Which, it is, but rude.

“You know what I mean.” He steps closer to her. “Even before you decided to go missing every day, before you knew, you’ve been acting strange.”

Clary rises to the bait, quickly defensive. “Well, maybe I need time to think.”

“Away from me.” He clarifies. 

She growls. “Yeah, away from you.” 

The delivery is flawless anger, venom injected into the word from between her teeth. Her eyes dare him to—he’s not quite sure—argue? fight? hurt? 

For once, she doesn’t look sorry after saying something mean to him, and that in and of itself is new too. He steps back a little, keeping his expression neutral. 

Clary is, apparently, more worked up than he is, raging humming through her body so strong he can feel it in himself, feeding off of it like a demon to discourse. He’s drawn to it. Famished as he is, he’ll take what he can get from her; even if it is arguments. 

“You can’t expect me to act like nothing’s happened.”

“It doesn’t have to change everything.”

“Maybe it does.” 

“Clary.” He tries, but finds no words because really what's his case in his favor? What makes him right?

“It does Jonathan, okay! Goddamnit, it does. This changes everything. Everything about our lives together—this changes so much—its—its—” Her hands are balled into fists around the sleeves of her jacket, knuckles turning white with effort. “What do you want me to say? That I love you back? I do love you, but you’re my brother. My brother.”

He tastes blood along with the ashy taste of burnt nicotine in his mouth. He realizes then that throughout Clary’s speech he had been shaking, teeth biting into his tongue. Slowly, he eases his jaw and flexes it.

In a matter of seconds Clary had not only confirmed his suspicions, but brought to light her own opinion. An easy guess, and he knows this, but the reality of it is just too much. He twists back on his heel, towards the westbound street. 

“We’ll talk later.” He says evenly and turns away, one step, two—

Clary gives out a cry like she’s about to attack, but the violence is merely verbal. 

“Oh, fuck you. Fuck you! That’s just like you to start a fight with me and then go running off when you don’t like my answer.” His heel spins in the dirt, but when he looks back she’s crying. She’s crying and he is disarmed, cigarette forgotten between his lips.

“I cannot help you Jonathan. There’s nothing I can do for you. Nothing I can give you. I’m sorry, alright? I am sorry that I don’t want this, okay? Now drop it, okay? Please.”

Before he can reply she’s already turning away and marching towards Renwicks at a half-run. He watches her until she’s a shadow in the darkness, disappearing through the barrier and safely within. 

They will talk later.

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism and grammar. Also, if you enjoyed this in the pit-of-hell with me, please let me know.


End file.
